This book on Berlin’s grand hotels is a cultural and business history of the fate of liberalism in Germany. Board members of the corporations that owned the grand hotels, as well as hotel managers and hotel experts, through their daily efforts to keep the industry afloat amid the vicissitudes of modern German history, ultimately abandoned liberalism and acquiesced to Nazi rule. Their correspondence among each other and with staff, the authorities, and the public, reveal how and why this multi-generational group of German businessmen, many of them involved in heavy industry and finance, too, embraced and then rejected liberal politics and culture in Germany. Weaknesses in the business model, present since the 1870s, had converged with a tendency toward anti-republicanism after the hyperinflation of 1923, resulting in the belief among most hoteliers that democracy was bad for business.

When war broke out in 1914, both sides initiated elaborate efforts to shift the world economy to a war footing. The war divided trade partners and exposed dependence on imports of strategic materials, prompting efforts to exploit enemies’ commercial vulnerabilities through the tools of blockade and submarine warfare. As the belligerents struggled to secure their supply lines, they also began to devise new legal and institutional safeguards to ensure permanent access to strategic materials in peacetime. Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl participated in the operation of the war economy and helped initiate planning for the future transition from war to peace. Their stories show how the experience of economic warfare was framed by the trade institutions and information networks inherited from the belle époque.

While great emergencies are fortunately rare and certainly devastating, the upside is that they are often accelerators of progress. Wars, pandemics, and emergencies have been catalysts for medical innovation out of necessity - a desperate attempt to compensate for the circumstances. They bend the trajectory of discovery in new directions and increase the rate at which certain medical discoveries are made. Chapter 16 is thus about how wars, outbreaks, and other emergencies influence the rate and direction of medical progress. It explores how both World Wars, the pandemic of 1918, and COVID-19 have altered the trajectory of discovery.

This chapter is concerned with Germany’s stand on State responsibility and liability. Regarding the former, the German position on State responsibility in the context of arms exports to Yemen is explored. Germany’s reading of the Nicaragua judgment is found to be both unnecessary and incorrect. Further, Germany’s differentiation between ‘bearing responsibility’ and ‘being responsible’ is assessed as being well founded in the context of a missile attack carried out on Saudi Arabia. Concerning the dispute with Greece on war reparations stemming from the two World Wars, Germany’s rejection of claims of reparations, grounded in the opinion that twhe issue is settled, is presented and discussed.

This chapter explains the further development throughout the twentieth century of public finance law and its impact on the distribution of financial authority between parliaments, executives and judiciaries. It accounts for the delegation of ever-greater financial authority to executive governments as a result of a number of major events: the world wars, the growth of the welfare state, the development of central banking and the influence of private-sector managerial philosophies on public administration. Taking a broad sample of Australia, Canadian, New Zealand and UK legislation and judicial doctrine, the chapter describes how and why sovereign borrowing was severed from parliamentary processes, the preponderance of public expenditure came to be authorised by standing (rather than annual) appropriation legislation, central banks acquired independent authority to provide monetary finance to treasuries and how public auditing functions became more concerned with the efficient (rather than lawful) use of public money. The manner in which judiciaries' jettisoned their private-property protecting attitude to taxation legislation is also explained.

The attempt to make abuse of right a part of international law was championed by Politis and Lauterpacht in the wake of the horrors of World War I. Their motivation was essentially idealistic, radical, and subversive; they wanted the concept to be used as a tool to overcome the stubborn refusal of states to yield sovereignty.

While there is an extensive body of literature on the German reception of Brahms up to World War I, until recently, few scholars have shown an interest in the ways in which National Socialists dealt with this composer. In German publications, there seems to be little acknowledgement of the possible complexities in Brahms reception caused by political influences; most post-war German literature on the composer has simply skirted the issue. Some writers have even suggested that Brahms was not much used for political purposes by the Nazis. Such suggestions are typically supported through direct comparisons with the long-acknowledged appropriations of other composers, notably Wagner.

Indeed, statistics such as those of the Berlin Philharmonic show no change in the frequency of performances of Brahms’s works during Hitler’s rule, even despite the straitened circumstances towards the end of the war. It seems that with concert-goers the composer’s popularity was never in question.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.